Emerald Fennell gives us Brideshead Revisited and The Talented Mr. Ripley dragged screaming into a fantastical modern world where desire perverts everything.

Like Charles Ryder in Brideshead, middle-class Oliver (Barry Keoghan) finds his Sebastian at Oxford in the form of Felix (Jacob Elordi). Feigning a traumatic past, Oliver enjoys Felix‘s sympathy and largesse, increasing his standing in an essentially class bound institution and resulting in an invitation to Felix’s family home of Saltburn. 

Like Charles, Oliver‘s desire to be a part of this world becomes a maelstrom of sexual desire, jealousy and inevitably heartbreak. Oliver is not bound by 1920s social mores though and like Tom Ripley he sets out to get what he desires even if it means destroying it in the process.

Saltburn is pervasively uneasy, through our suspicion of Oliver’s hidden malevolence and through Fennel’s shifting of mood from dark to millennial EDM electronic fluoro to comedic. Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant as Felix’s adorably clueless parents have the best lines and help ease the tension of all the brooding angst.

The blurring of sexual identity boundaries is refreshing, though it feels less like a celebration of queerness than a commentary on destructive desire. There is a lot of naked male flesh and lingering camera work, although I’m not sure it felt like a female gaze. The women were there but pushed to the margins. ‘Poor’ relation Farleigh (Archie Madekwe) is one of a very few characters of colour.

By the end I was unsure of the message or if I had learned anything I didn’t already know about the English gentry or fictional queer psychopaths. Keoghan is a good, solid lead but didn’t have the charisma that might make his narrative arc more believable. And Emerald Fennell can’t do endings. She allows this one to go on and on, in love perhaps with Keoghan dancing to pop music. It’s spells out what we already knew, undermining it’s believability by shining a light on it